Mark Simpson: The Only Person To Win Both
On 20 May 2006, a seventeen-year-old from Liverpool played Nielsen's Clarinet Concerto — a work of jagged, quarrelsome difficulty that established professionals treat with caution — and was named BBC Young Musician of the Year. In the same year he won the BBC Proms/Guardian Young Composer of the Year. He remains the first and only person ever to take both titles. The two competitions test faculties that almost never coexist at that level: the reflex of a performer and the imagination of an author.
King David High School
Simpson was born on 26 September 1988 in Liverpool and educated at King David High School in the city. His formal musical training began in the junior department of the Royal Northern College of Music, where he studied clarinet with Nicholas Cox and composition with Gary Carpenter — a dual track from the beginning, rather than a performer who later took up writing.
That structure is the key to everything he has done since. Most musicians are asked, early, to choose. Simpson was taught both disciplines in parallel by specialists in each, and appears never to have accepted that the choice was necessary.
Two Educations At Once
His higher education is correspondingly unconventional. He spent one term at the Royal College of Music, then left. Between 2008 and 2011 he read for a BA in Music at St Catherine's College, Oxford — an academic degree rather than a performance diploma. Afterwards he studied composition at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama with Julian Anderson, one of the most rigorous British composition teachers of his generation, while continuing private clarinet instruction with Mark van de Wiel.
Oxford for the thinking, Guildhall for the writing, van de Wiel for the playing. Also in 2006 he became principal clarinet of the National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain, and in 2007 he performed at the Last Night of the Proms in Hyde Park.
Twenty questions, eight minutes on the clock, and a percentile measured against everyone who has taken it. No sign-up.
Take the IQ test →The Composer Emerges
The compositions arrived early and did not stop. *It Was As if the Earth Stood Still* dates from 2005, when he was sixteen. *Lov(escape)*, for clarinet and piano, came in his double-winning year of 2006. *Threads for Orchestra* was premiered on 1 April 2008, and *Liverpool, The World in One City* on 3 July that year. *a mirror fragment…* also belongs to 2008, *Ariel* to 2009, *sparks* to 2012.
In 2014 he was awarded a Sky Academy Arts Scholarship. In 2015 the BBC Philharmonic appointed him its Composer in Association — the kind of post that hands a composer an orchestra to write for and, crucially, to hear.
The Immortal
His oratorio *The Immortal*, completed in 2014, won the Classical Award at the South Bank Sky Arts Awards in 2016. An oratorio is an unfashionable and unforgiving form: large-scale, choral, text-driven, requiring a composer to sustain an argument across an evening rather than a movement. That a composer still in his twenties chose it, and that it was recognised nationally, marked the point at which Simpson stopped being a promising former prodigy and became a composer with a body of work.
*Israfel* followed in 2015. His opera *Pleasure* was premiered in 2016. He completed a Violin Concerto in 2019, given an online premiere on 29 April 2021 — the pandemic's peculiar imposition on new music, a piece delivered to an empty hall and a camera.
His catalogue as a clarinettist has also drawn other composers to write for him: Edmund Finnis's *Four Duets* (2012) and Simon Holt's basset clarinet concerto *Joy Beast* (2017) both belong to that exchange.
Still Writing, Still Playing
The recent work shows no sign of settling. *Darkness Moves II*, for horn and electronics, appeared in 2025 and earned an Ivor Novello Award nomination in October of that year. *Hold Your Heart in Your Teeth*, a viola concerto, belongs to 2025/26. And in the 2025/26 season he became Artist in Residence at the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra — the composer-clarinettist returned, at thirty-seven, to the orchestra of the city he grew up in.
Why Mark Is Called a Genius
Here the claim is stronger than usual, and it rests on a documented, unrepeated fact rather than on impression. Simpson is the first and only person to have won both BBC Young Musician of the Year and the BBC Proms/Guardian Young Composer of the Year. Two national competitions, one testing instrumental execution and the other creative invention, both won in the same year by a seventeen-year-old.
What that combination indicates is genuinely cognitive rather than merely physical. Performance at the level of the Nielsen concerto demands automated motor control, real-time listening and nerve. Composition demands the opposite temperament: slow structural imagination, the ability to hold a large architecture in mind and to invent material that did not previously exist. The two are usually antagonistic — the practice hours that build one starve the other, and most musicians who attempt both end up merely competent at the second. Simpson has been recognised at national level for both, twenty years apart: BBC Young Musician in 2006, an Ivor Novello nomination for a horn-and-electronics piece in 2025.
The counter-case deserves airing. The double win was a competition result achieved at seventeen against other teenagers, not a verdict on mature work. His compositions have won a South Bank Sky Arts Award and an Ivor Novello nomination — real recognition, but well short of the international standing of his generation's leading composers. There is no substantial documented discography. And residencies and associate posts, of which he has held several, are as much institutional investment in potential as reward for achievement. The defensible claim is not that Simpson has written masterpieces but that he possesses a rare and demonstrable double capacity, and has spent two decades refusing to let either half atrophy.
The Return To Liverpool
There is a symmetry to the residency at the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic. The teenager who wrote *Liverpool, The World in One City* for his home town in 2008 is now the composer that town's orchestra has installed at its centre. Whether the works of the next decade — the viola concerto, whatever follows it — secure a place in the repertoire is the open question, and it is the only one that ultimately matters for a composer. What is already settled is that Simpson did something nobody had done before and nobody has done since, and that he did it by declining, at seventeen, to answer the question every young musician is asked: which one are you?
